Keyboard Shortcuts for Managing Gmail

A few months ago I was having some hand and arm pain on my right side. Working with the mouse in particular was a strain. It was only after a few days that I remembered, “Sheila, there are mail shortcuts you can be using to open, reply and send mail. You even have written about them!! Check your site if you’ve forgotten!”

Since they vary slightly between mail on PC and Mac, rather than detail them here, I refer you to an earlier post here on the blog.

To update – Since so many are now using Gmail, I went on a search to see if there are keyboard shortcuts for Gmail. And so there are!!!Instructions follow:

First you need to enable Keyboard shortcuts in the Settings.
To do that go to the gear in the upper right and click on it for the drop down settings. Click on the settings link and scroll down the page that opens until you get to the Keyboard shortcuts choices.
When done, be sure to click the Save Settings at the bottom of the page.

Once enabled a few of the email shortcuts you are most likely to use are:

Finally, for this email, if you are not familiar with them all, or as a reminder, the most commonly used Keyboard Shortcuts, when working in mail or any other documents, are:

Copy, Cut, Paste, Delete, Undo, Redo (the Undo – seemingly only in Word), and Find. I love when I remember to use “Find” for word search in a document as well as on web pages. It’s certainly a lot more efficient than scrolling through a page doing an “eyeball” search.
You can see the commands in my post – 7 Keyboard Shortcuts. Not on that page is the one for highlighting ALL of the content in a document, in an email or on a web page. Be sure to place your mouse in the area you want highlighted; then click Control or Command>a.